But she spoke, dispassionately as an oracle, from her strongly splendid aloofness.
"Think it out a little further, Cyprian, before you decide."
He felt the Master's lash about his body; and was stung by it to sharpened understanding.
Deliberately and fearlessly, Ferlie was challenging his faith. By it she would rise or fall.
If it drove him along that path of desire which led but to the grave, she would follow because her own will was pledged to his, "through all the beauty and all the loving of the eternal years...." She did not believe that this momentary impulse was grounded in his faith.
He saw, as in a drowning panorama, all the forms of all the acknowledged great lovers who had staked their gift of life upon Desire and, with the fading of that frail rainbow thing, had discovered themselves upon the edge of the burnt-out desert, Age, beyond which flowed only the bitterly black waters of Death. With the inexorable tread of the years Ferlie and he would be dying slowly before one another's watching eyes. The end must come in sweating battle with the impotency of those same bodies, glowing now in the deceiving radiance of a sun which would, some day, itself be darkened. Of what avail then the agonizing vows, sealed lip to lip in the sheltering purple shadows of dead nights whose beauty was now a scorching memory to contrast with the starless darkness of the opening tomb? (Ferlie had always been able to visualize that tomb.) There must be some other fulfilment for the love which has kept watch o'er its immortality. Some other road than this, along which the faithless "Little Ones" had stumbled with bleeding feet down the revealing arches of the years.... One was risking all for a shadow.... But as one saw the shadow it was that of a very mighty reality.... Behind every shadow there must be a substance. Ferlie had decided that herself ... already. In this, it was, fairly, hers to lead.
"Lead on," echoed Cyprian aloud of his heart, remembering when she had used the selfsame words to him.
She put out, to touch his, a hand still cool and damp with undried crystals of moisture.
"It is extraordinary to remember," she said, "that the crocodile had probably never set eyes on a human being before. There is, practically, no animal life in these forests, so Jelly told me, except pigs and birds. In the interior there are rumours of bison and, of course, the hamadryad we have always with us."
"Yes, your Garden of Paradise is certainly not serpentless," Cyprian answered, a note of amusement now in his voice.